I have to be honest – I didn’t think the release of the tape by Michael Cohen was that big of a deal. So, it proved beyond a doubt – ONCE AGAIN – that Dolt45 is a liar. But, we already knew that. It proved that he was involved in it -Any thinking person already knew that.

I have to admit, though, that this Twitter Thread did give me second pause.

Along, with the admission, that there are more tapes. The thing is…this couldn’t be the only woman that was paid off. The NDA was too boilerplate -meaning, it’s something that they did routinely. So, of course, there are other women out there. But, other tapes don’t have to limit themselves just to women. I doubt that it did. There is hanky stuff on those other tapes.

So, here’s the twitter thread that gave me food for thought.

(THREAD) TEN REASONS THE FIRST COHEN TAPE IS MUCH WORSE THAN ANYONE YET REALIZES. Early coverage of this bombshell exclusive on CNN has missed almost the entirety of this story, which could shape Trump's presidency. Read on for more. And I hope you'll share this with others, too. pic.twitter.com/pZR0AJZvzT

REASON #1: THERE ARE MORE TAPES. Team Trump is playing defense tonight as though this is all Cohen can hurt them with. It’s not—Cohen only released this tape as a defense against false info about the tape leaked by Team Trump. And if Cohen taped Trump once, he did it many times.

REASON #2: A BAD PRIVILEGE WAIVER. Trump waiving attorney-client privilege to let Giuliani spread *false* info about the tape not only backfired by convincing Cohen’s lawyer to release the tape, it could also hamstring Trump’s claims of privilege on the McDougal matter later on.

REASON #3: COHEN IS FLIPPING. By preemptively burning Cohen—making up a lie about the McDougal matter which had Cohen suggesting a payment in cash—Team Trump has absolutely ensured what previously was just very likely: Cohen will flip on Trump. And he has *many* stories to tell.

REASON #4: THE AUDIO ESTABLISHES MOTIVE. CNN edited the audio to exclude some inculpatory moments—notably, Trump telling Cohen, of damning info on his past relationships, “all you’ve got to do is delay it for [inaudible].” That helps establish this as an *election*-related plot.

REASON #5: IT ADDS NEW WITNESSES TO THE CASE. In the audio, a woman’s voice—possibly Rhona Graff’s—is heard, meaning we now know someone else besides Cohen can testify about what Trump said in this conversation. An assistant gets him a Coke, too, so she may also be a witness now.

REASON #6: THE FULL AUDIO ESTABLISHES CONTEXT. CNN appears to have wrongly attributed a reference to “David” as meaning David Pecker, head of AMI. But when Cohen talks about “information regarding our friend ‘David'” he’s referring to Trump’s alias for adulteries, David Dennison.

REASON #7: TEAM TRUMP DOUBLED THE DECEIT QUOTIENT. The audio puts Trump at the center of a pre-election plot to lie to voters about info that could have swayed their votes, but now it’s even worse, as Trump sent Giuliani out to lie to voters about a tape they can hear themselves.

REASON #8: TRUMP CLEARLY PROPOSES AN ILLICIT CASH PAYMENT. Trump’s state of mind—one-half what makes up a crime—is established by his comment about Ivana’s divorce filings, but also by his *clear* attempt to propose an untraceable cash payment rather than (as Cohen says) a check.

REASON #10: THE TAPE SUGGESTS MANY WOMEN, NOT JUST A FEW. Cohen repeatedly says that he needs to set up a company to deal with “all the stuff, all the stuff,” which tells Americans that *many* more women than Karen McDougal were paid off by Trump pre-election—as Bannon has said.

BONUS REASON #1: SHELL CORPORATIONS. The calmness and ease with which Cohen and Trump discuss setting up shell corporations suggests this was a common method for hiding inculpatory evidence. Cohen is going to spill the beans on *all such corporations* to Robert Mueller, and soon.

BONUS REASON #2: A WOMAN. Though this is a very minor point, Trump’s comment about Ivana—”you’ve got a woman who doesn’t want it unsealed”—underscores how he speaks about women in private. Calling his first wife and the mother of three of his kids “a woman” is unsettling to hear.

BONUS REASON #3: MARK BURNS. The audio reveals that Trump wanted to continue to use as a campaign surrogate Mark Burns, who was found in early September 2016 to have lied about his military service, education, and more. Cohen shuts him down on that, but the exchange is *telling*

BONUS REASON #4: GIVE IT TO ME. When Cohen raises using a shell corp to handle “all the information regarding our friend David [Dennison]”—the lies Trump told about his adulterous affairs—Trump says, cryptically, “give it to me,” underscoring how involved he was and wanted to be.

BONUS REASON #5: ALAN WEISELBERG. We now have reason to think—due to what Cohen says on the tape—that Trump Org exec Alan Weiselberg was involved in Trump’s conspiracy to violate election laws. So this tape has up to four witnesses who’ll confirm Trump is lying about all of this

CONCLUSION: Don’t believe Trump’s surrogates, stooges, or clandestine adviser-pundits: this is hard evidence of an election felony. The tape establishes motive, context, and state of mind for hiding from the FEC and voters unreported campaign contributions made by Cohen to Trump.
…………………………….

That it’s gotten to this point is ridiculous and another example of watching White Privilege in action.
Could you imagine what would be happening if this was 44?
Uh huh
Uh huh

But, this is just the opening salvo. It will be interesting to see how this progresses.

71 Responses to Thursday Open Thread | The Importance of Cohen Releasing the Tape

Holy Shit! Michael Cohen and his team didn't leak the Trump Tower news, "someone else" did. So that means, @realDonaldTrump's team are trying to take away Cohen's value to Mueller. They knew he was there and knew Trump knew so they are trying to get out in front of it! CRAZY!

This is why the House Intel Committee should have subpoenaed Donald Trump, Jr.’s phone records. There was a BLOCKED call sandwiched between two calls to the Russians who set up the Trump Tower meeting. Was it @RealDonaldTrump? https://t.co/33HigM5ORR

JUST IN: Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen asserts Donald Trump knew about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting in advance and was told by his son, Donald Trump Jr., before it happened, a knowledgeable source tells @NBCNewspic.twitter.com/grTkyWrsoF

BREAKING: Sources tell CNN that Michael Cohen claims candidate Trump knew in real-time about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, and gave the go-ahead for Don Jr. to meet Russians who were bringing dirt on Clinton. https://t.co/PetXdbwIpZ

The cost of Facebook’s privacy missteps caught up with the social media giant this week, sending its stock down as much as 20 percent today, a loss of more than $100 billion in value. Worries about the rising costs of privacy regulations, along with declining growth in users and revenue, played a key role in the selloff, which started Wednesday night after Facebook reported quarterly earnings.

By Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin •

Read more »https://s2.washingtonpost.com/877f9a/5b5a365afe1ff616fd8b9b21/YXdhcmVvZjQxMUBnbWFpbC5jb20%3D/7/63/3a569220054ddfca9b49a25bb24a75b5

When partisans go through the process of creating gerrymandered district lines, it’s easy to imagine them describing their efforts in crude and raw terms. But it’s one thing to imagine the language; it’s something else to see the emails documenting it. The New York Times reported:

Newly disclosed emails show Michigan Republicans angling to give their party a dominant position through gerrymandered maps and celebrating the plight of their Democratic rivals.

Republicans in the state have denied that they sought partisan gain when they drew new legislative boundaries in 2011. But a federal lawsuit, which argues the maps are unconstitutional, has unearthed records showing Republicans intent on drawing boundaries that would help their party.

Weisselberg isn’t a bit player in Trumplandia and his emergence on the Cohen-Trump recording – as someone possibly facilitating a scheme apparently meant to disguise a payoff – should worry the president. Weisselberg has detailed information about the Trump Organization’s operations, business deals and finances. If he winds up in investigators’ crosshairs for secreting payoffs, he could potentially provide much more damaging information to prosecutors than Cohen ever could about the president’s dealmaking.

As I noted in a column in April, the press and others have sometimes characterized Cohen as the man who knows all of Trump’s secrets or even, errantly, as someone who ran the Trump Organization with the president’s children. Not so.

Weisselberg, on the other hand, has worked for the Trump family since the 1970s, and knows more about the Trump Organization’s history and finances than nearly anyone. Almost 71 years old, he joined the company after graduating from college and worked for the president’s father, Fred, as an accountant. He has since become the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer and one of the president’s closest business confidants (alongside Jason Greenblatt, who was Trump’s in-house legal counsel before the president named him as a special diplomatic envoy to the Middle East).

Weisselberg also served as treasurer of the president’s troubled philanthropy, The Donald J. Trump Foundation, which the New York State Attorney General has sued for allegations involving “extensive and persistent violations of state and federal law.” The suit says the foundation routinely and willfully broke the law by engaging in self-dealing that ultimately came to include illegal coordination with Trump’s political campaign. Weisselberg hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing..

Privately, some Trump lawyers have expressed concern that Mueller will stitch together several episodes, encounters and pieces of evidence, like tweets, to build a case that Trump embarked on a broad effort to interfere with the investigation, NYT reports. https://t.co/kxeWA4bLyS— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 26, 2018

Just got off phone with a former Trump Org employee who echoed @KatyTurNBC reporting on Weisselberg subpoena: “Alan knows everything and anything about all the financials…He knows every dollar that goes in and every dollar that leaves. He knows where all the bodies are buried.”

WATCH: Children separated from their parents during the Holocaust recall lasting trauma they experienced from forced separation. TODAY is the deadline to reunite families. We’re calling on @POTUS to end zero tolerance & reunite children that remain separated from their parents. pic.twitter.com/KV0u9eCOQT

Nancy Pelosi on the motivation to impeach Rosenstein: “I don’t know, but what I’ve heard is Jim Jordan wants to take attention away from the scrutiny that he is under in Ohio, that could be a part of it.” (via ABC) pic.twitter.com/qzIiTLIj3M

Republicans want to drug test welfare recipients — they should test bankers as well

SNIP

Presumably, we believe that those with kids should have more money to spend on food, clothing, and schooling for their kids. Certainly, they should not take the tax subsidies we provide and spend them on drugs. At the very least, we should drug test everyone who takes the child tax credit to ensure that the money is not misspent. Anything less would sell out the children.

THISOr maybe there is a difference between “handouts” and subsidies designed to induce specific behavior. OK, I’ll bite, but that means that all of Wall Street — and shareholders too — should have been subjected to drug testing after receiving bailouts in 2008 and 2009.

One of the farmers that supports Trump called this bailout a ‘band aid’ and mentioned it will be a negligible amount compared to their real income losses. They supposedly couldn’t stand PBO, which is why they voted for Trump. What they fail to understand is that even though he knew they didn’t like him, PBO was their biggest trade ally. This move is akin to putting a bandage on a deep knife wound.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed on Wednesday to curtail Obama administration loan forgiveness rules for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, requiring that student borrowers show they have fallen into hopeless financial straits or prove that their colleges knowingly deceived them.

The DeVos proposal, set to go in force a year from now, would replace Obama-era policies that sought to ease access to loan forgiveness for students who were left saddled with debt after two for-profit college chains, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, imploded in 2015 and 2016.

The new rules won’t take effect right away – a public-comment period is poised to get underway – but they are scheduled to be implemented next summer.

And if this sounds at all familiar, it’s because this is hardly the first time Donald Trump’s Education secretary has taken steps like these.

The Obama administration also created a special team at the Department of Education to closely scrutinize dubious claims from for-profit colleges. Once DeVos joined the cabinet, she tapped a dean from a for-profit college to lead the team – and wouldn’t you know it, investigators examining alleged abuses found themselves “marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters.”

Georgia is at it again!! My husband checked his voter registration a couple months ago and was purged w/o notice. I checked mine at that time and I was still registered. I checked again today and I’m suddenly PURGED.

First, grab a tissue. Then watch this dad, who works three jobs, surprise his daughter with her dream dress for the 8th grade school dance after telling her he couldn’t afford it. (Video credit: Style Exchange Boutique/FB) #allthefeels #becauseofthemwecan pic.twitter.com/UKPLDRwwK6

WASHINGTON – Republican Rep. Jim Jordan has told colleagues he plans to run for House speaker, a move that would spark a contentious leadership battle in the House GOP conference just a few months before the November election.

Jordan — one of the most powerful conservatives in Congress — plans to announce his bid Thursday, according to three GOP sources familiar with his plans. The three sources declined to speak on the record to avoid getting ahead of Jordan’s announcement.

Jordan’s bid for the top leadership spot replacing current speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin comes just one day after he and his conservative allies filed articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in an escalating battle with the Department of Justice over the agency’s investigation into Russian meddling into the 2016 election.

The @whca fought tooth and nail to have Fox News substantially included in briefings. Now a former Fox news exec is in charge of the entire press operation at the WH and is imposing a fascist ban on press. Weird how that works. https://t.co/NwHMgNdGBk

“Mommy, I love you and adore you and miss you so much,” the girl wrote in curvy block letters. And then she implored: “Please, Mom, communicate. Please, Mom. I hope that you’re OK and remember, you are the best thing in my life.”

Jerry Jones is ignoring the NFL-NFLPA agreement to work together by saying Cowboys will be forced to stand for the anthem. In the same press conference, he says the team will continue its relationship with Papa John’s. pic.twitter.com/fh3cxBsex9

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook shares dove 19 percent Thursday, with the social networking giant shedding about $120 billion in market value after the company warned of slowing sales growth.

Traders braced for a decline in tech stocks as the market opened Thursday, with a potential cascading effect likely to hit competitors Snap and Twitter. Facebook remained down 20 percent in premarket trading Thursday after plunging as much as 24 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday.

Chief financial officer David Wehner triggered the selloff when he said Facebook’s sales growth would continue to slow through the rest of the year. Shares, which had already declined 7 percent after hours, then tumbled further after the comments on a conference call with analysts.

Michael Grunwald @ MikeGrunwald
-Obama never had numbers this abysmal, but the frame for all his coverage was Unpopular President.
-Of course it never occurred to me to pitch my bosses: Obama’s re-elect #’s are under 50%, how about a story on Democrats who still like him?

Ecuador has grown increasingly unhappy with the asylum arrangement in recent months. In March, Ecuador barred Assange from using the Internet from the embassy for violating an agreement he signed at the end of 2017 not to use his communiques to interfere in the affairs of other states.

Ecuador has toughened its stance following the election in May of President Lenin Moreno, who has described Assange as a “hacker,” an “inherited problem” and a “stone in the shoe.”

Assange, an Australian computer programmer, particularly drew the ire of Ecuador by angering the Spanish government with his support for separatist leaders in Spain’s Catalonia region who sought to secede last year.

The Times of London reported last week that British ministers and senior Foreign Office officials were “locked in discussions over the fate of Assange.”

NEW POLL: By **31 points** Americans believe the GOP is responsible for any problems with the ACA. Good luck in November! https://t.co/NC4WNKAx5I pic.twitter.com/dt3lhRMoKI— Topher Spiro (@TopherSpiro) July 25, 2018

Yeah, Ted has debating skills in technical terms. But he’s also a preening oleaginous shirthead. And O’Rourke is appealing. So this is move from weakness. No incumbent decides to do a bunch of debates for the fuck of it. https://t.co/4C5QrmDlIg

Very tough battle ahead and uphill. But I agree. Real sign that Cruz’s internal numbers are bad and that he could lose. https://t.co/MC0Nnbwkw7

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 26, 2018

My theory is that his support is softer than the public polls suggest, and even those show him barely at 50%. He wants to nationalize/ideologize the race around a series of hard ideological issues and thinks debates are vehicle to do that. https://t.co/OLA6WO9CKR

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 26, 2018

And to be clear, I’m not saying o’rourke is winning or will win. It’s an **extremely** tough climb. But candidates cruising to reelection don’t propose multiple debates. Even if you’re the biggest shitlord in the universe, which Ted is.

I don’t get why all the MSNBC shows don’t put all their segments online. Hayes has segments that I’m not even interested in, and the best one from his show last night isn’t even available. Hayes had asked a good question of a former prosecutor. He didn’t understand why Dolt45 wasn’t making a stink about the Cohen video. The prosecutor said that, from viewing the tape, if he had to guess, he believes that the Special Master (the person reviewing all of Cohen’s stuff and determining what’s allowable under lawyer/client privilege and what’s not), came back to Cohen/Dolt45, and told them that this tape wasn’t going to be allowed under client privilege, because it was obvious THAT A CRIME WAS BEING COMMITTED, and that is the ONE exception to attorney/client privilege.

If they didn’t want her to make clear that was the reason this wasn’t covered by privilege, they could stop her, by removing attorney/client privilege objection to the tape. That was his explanation. And, he had a lot of other interesting criminal points. Can’t believe THAT is the segment that’s NOT online….UGH.

Every year, thousands of women suffer life-altering injuries or die during childbirth because hospitals and medical workers skip safety practices known to head off disaster, a USA TODAY investigation has found.

Doctors and nurses should be weighing bloody pads to track blood loss so they recognize the danger sooner. They should be giving medication within an hour of spotting dangerously high blood pressure to fend off strokes.

These are not complicated procedures requiring expensive technology. They are among basic tasks that experts have recommended for years because they can save mothers’ lives.

Yet hospitals, doctors and nurses across the country continue to ignore them, USA TODAY found.

As a result, women are left to bleed until their organs shut down. Their high blood pressure goes untreated until they suffer strokes. They die of preventable blood clots and untreated infections. Survivors can be left paralyzed or unable to have more children.

The vast majority of women in America give birth without incident. But each year, more than 50,000 are severely injured. About 700 mothers die. The best estimates say that half of these deaths could be prevented and half the injuries reduced or eliminated with better care.

Instead, the U.S. continues to watch other countries improve as it falls behind. Today, this is the most dangerous place in the developed world to give birth.

Identifying every hospital that doesn’t provide recommended care is next to impossible. There is no national tracking system for childbirth complications. Mothers tell harrowing tales of survival, but they often have no idea whether their doctors and nurses did something wrong.

USA TODAY obtained more than a half-million pages of internal hospital quality records and examined the cases of more than 150 women whose deliveries went terribly wrong. Reporters contacted 75 birthing hospitals to track whether they follow recommended procedures.

Together, these documents and interviews reveal a stunning lack of attention to safety recommendations and widespread failure to protect new mothers.

Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) Tweeted:
On the way we learned that Mariia Butina was arrested, the Trump administration that day unveiled a new rule dropping the long-standing requirement that organizations like the NRA have to disclose their major donors to the IRS.

Update on last night's A block: The White House admits the question about Putin supporting Trump is missing from its online transcript. The White House hasn't corrected it. Hasn't fixed the video either. pic.twitter.com/DPEDPjPAvw

I honestly don’t understand why Maddow is the only one, it seems, that let’s you access her entire show. There was a former prosecutor on Hayes last night that gave a superb explanation of why Dolt45 waived privilege with this video. I hope that this is the explanation.

Stop the Speaker (@StopTheSpeaker) Tweeted:
Paul Ryan seems determined that his legacy reflect that he fought to the death on what he calls ‘welfare reform,’ and what everyone else calls kicking people off Food stamps.https://t.co/wLBnVKTyfe

Paul Ryan seems determined that his legacy reflect that he fought to the death on what he calls ‘welfare reform,’ and what everyone else calls kicking people off Food stamps. https://t.co/wLBnVKTyfe

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